Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.

As long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.

If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.

Suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.